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For the first time in at least 10 years, Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons are all losing market share

New landscape for ‘big four’ supermarkets

For the first time in at least 10 years, Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons are all losing market share

By Telegraph View

11:47PM GMT 19 Nov 2013

Britain’s supermarket industry has entered a new era. For the first time in at least 10 years, Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons are all losing market share, according to Kantar. This is not just a statistical anomaly, it is a reflection that the supermarket industry has become ex-growth. There are straightforward reasons for this. Between the 1950s and 2008, grocery retailers rushed to open new self-service stores and then out-of-town supermarkets across the country. Read more of this post

Tea traders hope for imminent recovery

November 20, 2013 9:10 am

Tea traders hope for imminent recovery

By Javier Blas in Nairobi

When Williamson Tea Kenya, one of the biggest growers of the leaf in Africa, released its quarterly results earlier this month, it had a blunt warning: the price drop to a five-year low had created a “commercially unsustainable” market. The agribusiness group was not exaggerating:black tea prices have tumbled more than 40 per cent since January as top importers Pakistan and Egypt cut purchases just as output surged on the back of favourable weather in late 2012 and early 2013. Read more of this post

Oysters Boom as Raw Bars Drive Demand for More Varieties

Oysters Boom as Raw Bars Drive Demand for More Varieties

“Everyone’s growing oysters,” Chris Quartuccio says over his shoulder as he paddles a neon-orange kayak across Long Island’s Great South Bay, where he’s raising some 300,000 Blue Island oysters on the shallow seafloor, 50 miles east of Manhattan. He might be right. Close to a hundred oyster farms have sprung up during the past decade or so, in bays, creeks and tidal ponds strung along the Atlantic seaboard from Virginia to Canada’s Prince Edward Island, Bloomberg Pursuits magazine will report in its Holiday 2013 issue. Read more of this post

Coal Seen as New Tobacco Sparking Investor Backlash: Commodities

Coal Seen as New Tobacco Sparking Investor Backlash: Commodities

About $8 trillion of known coal reserves lie beneath the earth’s surface. The companies planning to mine and burn them are being targeted by a growing group of investors concerned with the greenhouse gases that will be made. Storebrand ASA (STB), which manages $74 billion of assets from Norway, sold out of 24 coal and oil-sands companies since July including Peabody Energy Corp. (BTU), the largest U.S. coal producer, citing a desire to cut fossil-fuel industry holdings. This month Norway’s opposition Labour Party proposed banning the country’s $800 billion sovereign wealth fund from coal investments. Read more of this post

Bitter aftertaste in Myanmar Breweries JV follows F&N takeover by Thai tycoon

Bitter aftertaste follows F&N takeover

Wednesday, Nov 20, 2013

Goh Eng Yeow

The Straits Times

For those who make it to the big time, reputation is everything. In fact, it is priceless. So publicity-shy Thai billionaire Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi must find extremely discomfiting the bad publicity dogging Fraser & Neave (F&N). He now owns 90.3 per cent of the conglomerate after mounting a costly $13.7 billion takeover which ended in February. Read more of this post

Singapore Property Boom Fuels Malaysia Spillover Bubble

Singapore Property Boom Fuels Malaysia Spillover Bubble

Chris Metcalf commutes for 45 minutes to Singapore each day from Iskandar, a region just over the border in Malaysia, to work as a lawyer at Clyde & Co LLP. “It’s too expensive to live in Singapore,” said Metcalf, who moved across the Johor Strait in June after finding he could no longer afford the island-state on a local salary and with four children. “We’re selling a house in the U.K. and when we do we’ll consider buying in Malaysia because it’s definitely better value.” Read more of this post

As Myanmar Modernizes, Old Trades Are Outpaced By New Competitors

November 19, 2013

As Myanmar Modernizes, Old Trades Are Outpaced By New Competitors

By THOMAS FULLER

YANGON, Myanmar — For years they poured out their hearts on the broken pavements of Myanmar’s cities and towns, young lovers desperate for privacy yet with no choice but to use what the Burmese call roadside phone shops. Daw Myint Myint Than, who rents out her two phone lines in central Yangon, has heard it all: the sobbing, heartbroken women; the angry spouses; the duplicitous boyfriends who gush sweet nothings to one girlfriend, hang up and repeat the same sweet nothings to another. Read more of this post

Why the future looks sluggish; The glut of savings in leading economies has become a constraint on demand

November 19, 2013 7:09 pm

Why the future looks sluggish

By Martin Wolf

The glut of savings in leading economies has become a constraint on demand

Lawrence Summers has poured gallons of icy water on any remaining optimists. Speaking on a panel at the International Monetary Fund’s annual research conference, the former US Treasury secretary suggested that there could be no easy return to pre-crisis normality in high-income economies. Instead, he sketched out a disturbing future of chronically weak demand and slow economic growth. Mr Summers is not the first to identify the possibility of so-called “secular stagnation”: the fear of emulating Japan’s lost decade has been in the minds of thoughtful analysts since the crisis. But his was a bravura performance. Read more of this post

Wall Street banks must abandon ‘cottage industry’ model: McKinsey

Wall Street banks must abandon ‘cottage industry’ model: McKinsey

8:06am EST

By Lauren Tara LaCapra

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The biggest Wall Street banks have not done nearly enough to boost shareholder returns, despite years of cost-cutting and tailoring balance sheets to a more profitable mix, consulting firm McKinsey & Co said in a report released on Wednesday. If those banks do not take more dramatic steps to reshape their business models, the industry’s return on equity could fall further – to a mere 4 percent by 2019 from 8 percent last year, the report said. Read more of this post

Trader gets 30 months in prison for $1 billion Apple stock scheme

Trader gets 30 months in prison for $1 billion Apple stock scheme

6:01pm EST

(Reuters) – A former trader was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison on Tuesday for an unauthorized purchase of about $1 billion in Apple Inc stock that eventually led to the demise of financial services firm Rochdale Securities. David Miller, 41, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Robert Chatigny in Hartford, Connecticut, seven months after pleading guilty to wire fraud and conspiracy. Read more of this post

Smart-Beta Risks Not Clear Enough

Smart-Beta Risks Not Clear Enough

By Rebecca Hampson

November 19, 2013

In March this year, Edhec-Risk Institute made headlines when it announced it had launched a new smart beta platform offering investors free data. The move saw several commercial indexproviders speak out against the move arguing that data provision is part of a commercial business model and necessarily paid for. Since then Edhec has been highly vocal over its position on transparency and data availability. It has spoken out against the International Organisation of Securities Commissions (IOSCO’s) guidelines for ETFs arguing that it side-stepped the matter of index transparency. Most recently it took issue with the European Fund and Asset Management Association’s (EFAMA’s) criticism of the rules that European regulator, European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), laid out. It even made several calls for users to insist on full transparency earlier this year. IU.eu’s European editor, Rebecca Hampson, talks to Frederic Ducoulombier, director at Edhec-Risk in Asia, about why investors should have access to index data and why it is being pushed so fiercely.  Read more of this post

Rising numbers of secret landlords drive mortgage fraud

November 20, 2013 12:02 am

Rising numbers of secret landlords drive mortgage fraud

By Kate Allen

More homeowners are fraudulently subletting properties without their mortgage lender’s approval, according to new figures from Experian, the credit checking agency. Renting homes out without permission from lenders was the biggest driver of mortgage fraud in the first six months of 2013, Nick Mothershaw, director of identity and fraud at Experian, said. Read more of this post

Man Group employees feel the squeeze at Riverbank House in London; In mid-2008, Man Group had a market cap of $20bn. Today it is $2.5bn. The world’s second-largest hedge fund company has seen its assets under management fall from a peak of almost $80bn in 2008 to $52.5bn

November 20, 2013 7:25 am

Man Group employees feel the squeeze at Riverbank House in London

By Chris Newlands

Man Group employees are feeling the squeeze at the struggling hedge fund, with staff at its London headquarters being shunted into just one-and-a-half floors of the nine-story building it opened to great fanfare in 2011. One senior executive based at the HQ on the banks of the Thames said: “We are being shoved into a much smaller area, which people aren’t really happy about it. Our fund assets are shrinking and so it seems is our floor space.” Read more of this post

Junk Glistens Under ‘Bernankecare’ as Worst Stocks Win

Junk Glistens Under ‘Bernankecare’ as Worst Stocks Win

By Nick Taborek and Mary Childs – Nov 19, 2013

Carl Giannone says he’s given up hunting for quality stocks. Now he’s simply riding the wave of upward momentum in the U.S. market. “It’s a game of musical chairs,” said Giannone, who manages an equities team at T3 Trading Group LLC in New York. “You just want to make sure you can sit down.” Read more of this post

Jim Rogers: “One Day, Markets Will Stop Playing This Game”

Jim Rogers: “Own Gold” Because “One Day, Markets Will Stop Playing This Game”

Tyler Durden on 11/19/2013 20:33 -0500

Jim Rogers hope-driven wish is that the politicians were smart enough at some point to say (to the central bankers), “we’ve got to stop this, this is going to be bad.” He adds, on the incoming QEeen, “she’s not going to stop it, first of all she doesn’t believe in stopping it, she thinks printing money is good.” However, Rogers warns in this excellent interview with Birch Gold, “eventually the markets will just say, “We’re not going to play this game anymore”, and we’ll have a serious collapse.” The world is blinded by central bank liquidity, and as Rogers somewhat mockingly notes “if everybody says the sky is blue, I urge you to look out the window and see if it’s blue because I have found that most people won’t even bother to look out the window…” Rogers concludes, “everybody should own some precious metals as an insurance policy,” because as he ominously warns, when ‘it’ collapses, “there will be big change. Read more of this post

Jeremy Grantham On Timing Bear Markets: 25% Upside Left And Then The Bust “We All Deserve”

Jeremy Grantham On Timing Bear Markets: 25% Upside Left And Then The Bust “We All Deserve”

Tyler Durden on 11/19/2013 21:29 -0500

From Jeremy Grantham of GMO

Timing Bear Markets

My personal view is that the Greenspan-Bernanke regime of excessive stimulus, now administered by Yellen, will proceed as usual, and that the path of least resistance, for the market will be up. I believe that it would take a severe economic shock to outweigh the effect of the Fed’s relentless pushing of the market. Look at the market’s continued advance despite almost universal disappointment in economic growth. Exhibit 3 shows the economic forecasts for major economic countries made a year ago by the IMF compared to what actually happened. Only Japan was a modest pleasant surprise at 0.7% ahead of forecast and the U.K. and Switzerland scraped home by the skin of their teeth. Everyone else fell short. There have been few such occasions when such broad disappointment with economic growth still allowed the U.S. and most other major economies to make material upward moves in their stock markets. It is yet another testimonial to the global reach of the Fed’s stimulus of equities (as was the very substantial decline in emerging market equities on just talk of tapering!) Read more of this post

Investment, not the surplus, is Germany’s big problem

November 18, 2013 7:44 pm

Investment, not the surplus, is Germany’s big problem

By Marcel Fratzscher

The challenge for the new government is to cut the private investment gap, says Marcel Fratzscher

Germany is under attack from the US government, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission for its huge current account surplus. The criticism is right, but for the wrong reasons. The surplus is excessive, but the accusation that it hurts Europe is nonsense. Worse, it distracts German policy makers from tackling the true cause of the national surplus and the country’s economic Achilles heel: its huge private investment gap. Read more of this post

Integrating ESG at Norway’s giant SWF

Integrating ESG at Norway’s giant SWF

Posted By AMANDA WHITE On 20/11/2013 @ 3:36 pm In ANALYSIS | No Comments

How could you integrate ESG into a portfolio of 7,000 stocks? Behind the Strategy Council’s report to the Norwegian Ministry of Finance on responsible investment for the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global.

The Strategy Council, led by Professor Elroy Dimson from the London Business School and Cambridge Business School, has advised the Norwegian Ministry of Finance on the responsible investment strategy for the giant Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global, focusing on its strategy, issues of transparency and a more integrated approach to responsible investing. Read more of this post